No matter the reigning orthodoxy — in our department it was, as in the vast majority of English departments across North America, Leftist, anti-Western, feminist, and multiculturalist — the desire to fall in line, and to compel or outlaw those who do not, seems to be an enduring fact of human nature.

I still remember my surprise at the uniformity of opinion I discovered in that department. Expecting to find open, civil debate — every one of my colleagues, after all, held a doctorate and was a published author accustomed to defending his or her research in public forums — I was struck by the timorousness of many of my colleagues in discussion and the aura of the forbidden sacrosanct that seemed to gather around many subjects.

The phenomenon, not surprisingly, reached beyond individual departments. Attending an international conference on the novelist Carol Shields, I noticed how the few male scholars in attendance were so eager to display their feminist badges of membership. One older man, perhaps aware that his age and deportment might identify him with the (now long-defunct) patriarchy still so strenuously “resisted” by the feminist scholars, sought at every opportunity to show his pious solidarity with their cause.

One might object to my implication that there is any bad faith in the ideological fellow-feeling I observed. After all, thinking people may come, quite independently and non-coercively, to agree about such contentious matters as the pervasiveness of hetero-patriarchal oppression, the plight of Palestinian victims, the crimes of the United States, the environmental measures necessary to save the Earth, the nature of Islam as the maligned religion of peace, and so on — the litany of positions that have become articles of faith in so many departments of English. For a variety of reasons, however, I do not believe that my colleagues came to agreement in such an innocuous way.

First, there is nothing in the study of literature that would necessarily incline those who pursue it to take up Leftist positions. If anything, literature in English — which brings to vivid life the stories and worldviews of peoples of many different historical periods, cultures, and belief systems — would seem more likely to appeal to scholars with divergent political convictions and ideals; indeed, it might appeal equally well to those who lack strong convictions, who are curious and impartial.

77 Comments, 46 Threads

1.
some of my best friends

Well, OK, but are we really surprised? Many have encountered the unforgettable personal flaws and pathologies found in every faculty lounge: cowardice, narcissism, helplessness if the face of the challenges and chores of daily living, all the deep inadequacies instantly visible when compelled to confront the real world, fear above all. Worse than in the general population ‘outside’? Oh yeah.

Everything the author says is true about the humanities, but she seems to be in an advanced state of despair, in my book, a sin. It was the authoritarian liberals (social democrats) who brought about this state of affairs in the humanities, and they will either prevail in all their protofascism or fascism, or they will be brought down by market forces, as other forms of advanced education take hold. Meanwhile, here is an index to my multiculturalism blogs, showing the German Romantic lineage. There might be something useful here: http://clarespark.com/2011/03/28/index-to-multiculturalism-blogs/.

It will take time to digest the article. Such time will not be pleasant as it must inevitably bring back memories of my professional activities at two American universities. I never communicated my political opinions and was accepted effectively as a “democrat”. My experience way back then (bad health forced an early retirement) reminds me of the words of a Chinese colleague (who took a theology degree in Europe — his father had been a fighter for Mao >> >privileges). This quite outstanding scholar, yes with Christian beliefs, told me that he had more or less freedom of speech in China, only restricted to never saying anything against the government. In my case, silence was directed towards my peers.

I find a sort of ambuiguity in the article or, maybe, I need more reflection. I hold that not only is intellectuality (modes of thinking, theories, etc.), but also a very unclean and fundamental MORAL betrayal of honest intellectual expression takes place because of a “politically, viz. peer-group correctness” re values. I will give two illustrations. Values and intellectuality fuse at times.

1) I was one of 7 profs with a dean who decided on tenure, promotions and, of course, salary augmentation. At one meeting a young assistant prof. wanted immediate tenure, advancement and, naturally, more salary, all at least two years too early. His department did a review and concluded that, despite talent, the applicant lacked adequate fundamentals. In short, the man needed more time to prove himself. Vote, unanimous rejection. Two weeks later the same assistant prof. reapplied as an officially designated “minority”. In the light of that info, despite MY reminding my colleagues about anti-decrimination, favoritism, etc., the vote was 7 to 1 for immediate advancement. In my judgment, the behavior of collegues betrayed their MORAL integrity as intellectuals in favor of the reigning ideology (backed by Fed. demands to be hypocritical). I was not punished as I did not press my “free speech” and loudly protest.

2) When a undergrad at a California state college (they have been mostly promoted to university status) I founded with a friend a conservatie club with publication. We had a faculty sponsor. We were a success. Our sponsor received such ostracizing (e.g., he entered the Faculty Lounge and colleques exited) that he quit his job and found a new one at a small private uni., even there he did no sponoring.

My point is that there is a conformity, biased towards leftism, that insiduously perverts the very integrity of the intellectuality that should reign at a college or university. The minds of students are not only exposed to “captivity”, but also the minds of many profs are self-surrendered to “captivity” and they do not even know it.

Note: At one Spanish universtiy where I was an “invitado” I found an academic version of the “civil war”. In one case, the administration simply hired a replacement for a sitting Full Professor. One day the man (and I knew him) came to his office and his replacement was there. A suit followed and my friend won his case. The example is extreme, but does cast light on the “academic” mind infused with politically correct leftism.

Warn your elected representatives that you expect them to vote AGAINST any and all appropriations that contribute to the coffers of “higher education” – including scholarships, fellowships, and loans.]

It’s not just a bias towards Leftism. The regional accreditors have been pushing quite hard to make the colleges and universities every mantra center around diversity. The current equal access to credentials movement will only make this worse. Spearheaded by the Lumina Foundation, this Diploma Qualifications Profile now being piloted puts the focus on whether degree seekers have the right attitudes and whether they have been seeking the desired political actions to obtain social justice. Becoming the enforcer for desired attributes and affective attitudes and beliefs and actions, will take the existing tendency documented in this article and make it significantly worse.

Secondly, this is not just a higher ed problem. Because of the true definition of continuous improvement and the mandates of Positive Behavior Psychology practices (PBIS) for all students under Positive School Climate edicts, we are looking at K-12 monitoring attitudes and beliefs and feelings and daily actions. In fact, the accreditors are not much interested in knowledge except to try to prevent it as inequitable and too individualistic. Each child’s physical, social, and emotional needs are to be tracked as longitudinal data. Property of the state. In a P-20 world, the manipulated student just keeps shifting necessary degree programs, bringing ever more revenue into corrupted coffers.

The acute emphasis of the Common Core on social, emotional, and psychological manipulation of students, K-12 and higher ed, cannot happen in a free country. That these measures are being mandated for US classrooms, driven in part by what the UN is pushing on other countries in the West, shows we are quickly ceasing to be free in fact. The servitude is merely still invisible and we are deluded by still having access to the ballot box.

In my opinion (admittedly biased), it’s a difference between ideas and beliefs. Ideas, political or otherwise, are meant to be discussed, debated and experimented with in order to determine their validity, i.e. “does it work in the real world?” Conservatives, in the political sense, operate primarily in the world of ideas. Conservative ideas such as free enterprise, school choice, low taxes, smaller government, etc. have been debated, tried, and demonstrated to be effective.

Liberals, on the other hand, are political “believers.” Beliefs are typically closed-end systems that don’t adapt or change. Global warming, the moral superiority of the war on poverty, the inherent goodness of multiculruralism, economic “unfairness”, are all good examples of liberal beliefs. One must either believe or not believe because there is no direct evidence or facts that can be cited to show they are valid or successful. Liberals seem to lack the critical thinking skills needed to discount personal opinion, prejudice, or anecdote in favor of clear evidence and they habitually seek information only from sources that reinforce their pre-held notions. Therefore, they don’t want to hear your differing opinions in the faculty lounge, logical though they may be..

Will it ever change? Probably not in my lifetime. I’ve tried honest debate with liberals and even when faced with irrefutable facts, they inevitably fall back on platitudes (their beliefs) or simply change the subject.

You can’t make people smarter; you can only expose them to information. Your responsibility ends there.

The modern university is hopelessly corrupt, both morally and intellectually bankrupt. The only reason anyone who does not already share the leftist Gleichschaltung of politically correct self-induced idiocy sends a child to an elite college or university is the gate-keeping function they serve for the elite: without an elite degree, many doors in the elite business world and social elites will simply be closed.

It will take two, perhaps three, generations, but either the universities will change or they will be supplanted with other forms of education that do effectively transmit the culture and the values of the West.

George Mason Economics. My 2 oldest kids love Prof Rustici. #3, though, tried to tell me that “global temperatures are higher than they have ever been in the history of the world”. “Wow”, I replied, “I had no idea you were a Creationist. You’re a lot more educated than most of the other Creationists I know, and have more teeth*”.

It’s getting harder for a professor to dissent from multiculturalism when the students he’s teaching are multicultural.

Recently, I returned to my old Alma Mater for a reunion, and I saw the changes. Compared with when I went to college, today’s young students include fewer white Americans of European descent, and far more Asians. Plenty of blacks and Hispanics too.

So that’s the student body that the professors are teaching. And the problem the professors have is the same problem Romney ran into: The attempt to defend Western culture and the Western heritage in a time when fewer Americans are of Western descent, and a time when Asian nations are rising in power.

If present demographic trends continue, by the year 2100 a majority of Americans will be Hispanics. And they’re going to be more interested in Mexican literature than in the European classics.

The torch appears to be passing from Europe to Asia. The U.S. may do well because it’s a Pacific power as well as an Atlantic power. But its universities are going to be forced to emphasize a grounding in Asian culture more than in European culture.

Having a multicultural student body makes it even more necessary to teach the basis of American values, culture and history. It is obvious, a priori, that immigrants (even second generation) are not steeped in American history.

I have my doubts about the Asian males. There is an odd hierarchy in equal-opportunity thinking that ranks those excluded from privilege (privilege as in the opportunity to work your butt off in STEM classes), not by race, sex, gender, or other physical characteristics, but in inverse order of interest or talent. Thus, if you are a witless Valley Girl who flunked algebra twice or an inner-city gangbanger with a three-page rap sheet, it is necessary to exclude a couple of Asian males with 2300+ SATs from an engineering program to give these underrepresented minorities an opportunity to show what they’re made of. Of course, when they do demonstrate their talent by flunking out, it’s further evidence of bigotry and discrimination.

It is still more an ideological issue than ethnicity IMO. Actual Anglo whites have always been a minority in the territory of the US (a small minority / around 10%). Most people who appreciate the government system and common law traditions we have are converts so to speak (re: not English by blood). I’m of European decent but from a group that does not identify with Rome or Western traditions. But, being born here, I see the superiority of the US law and tradition and like the Anglosphere ideas of forming closer bonds with other English speaking countries (India included)… to the exclusion of groups (European / white included) who are hostile to them.

*** The attempt to defend Western culture and the Western heritage in a time when fewer Americans are of Western descent,***

I don’t see how that obtains. They are here in our country,presumably not only for an education but because of our culture. Our culture as yet, still stands for freedom of the sort that is found nowhere else in the world.

To reverse the thought, would there be a good reason for me not to want to hear about different Asian cultures (defense) if I moved to one of those countries? Changing a course for the reason you gave strikes me as odd. It seems as though you’ve been hit with the PC stick.

I know it seems as though many Mexicans (I refuse to use Hispanic, because the vast amount come from Mexico) bring their own culture, but Asians, especially Chinese and Japanese seem to assimilate well. Why would you find it necessary to not teach them about our unique American (not simply Western)culture when they’re here in our country? If more academics would get over the idea of defense and simply teach our culture, there would be a whole lot less angst and possibly more discussion because the students would then ask you to defend a postulate.

If that sounds naive, so be it, I’m not an academic. I find this subject fascinating and am enjoying all the comments.

A very fine essay, which underscores the dangers that accompany the sad and smelly little orthodoxies that now infect our universities and which have unhappy implications for life in the wider world. But perhaps there is hope, of a kind. There was a time when American historians were consumed with the concept of ‘national character,’ a subject which brought forth large numbers of very fine studies. And then the sixties came, and the concept of ‘national character’ was deemed archaic and invalid, a manifestation of imperial hubris, colonial oppression, etcetera. The point: academic fashions come and go, and it is almost certain that the current ‘post-colonial,’ ‘patriarchal,’ and ‘diversity’ centered studies will themselves one day seem rather quaint, old-fashioned and irrelevant. What is remarkable is that those whose disdain for the scholarly achievements that they so absolutely dismissed with prejudice a generation ago cannot imagine that a similar fate awaits their own sacred truths. The narcissism that attends political correctness is breathtaking.

All dressed up boarding that train to Poland. Even we on this site would eventually come to some position of agreement with most of the edges worn down. What happens when dogma collides with reality? Our nation and our economy rely on a boat that floats!

I’m reminded of the quip, “faculty politics are so vicious precisely because so little is at stake.”

But, more seriously, I’m reminded of another Lewis passage: “It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies… those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

I absolutely agree with you having witnessed this as a graduate student at Colimbia in the 1980s. With a few exceptions I have found the professors to be lazy, intellectually & otherwise.

When these professors participate in the outside world by commenting in non-academic blogs esp non-leftist ones, I have found them to be condescending & vitriolic to those who rationally disagree with them. It’s as if they are right & how can anyone without a PhD question them. Their view of the world is correct because they have a PhD —— eqivalent to a lord with land back in the Middle Ages.

You nailed it on the head. You stated that when these “professors” are commenting in the outside world ie “non academic blogs” they become “condenscending” and “vitriolic”. I thought I was only person who noticed this. They are right becuase they have Phd’s. These people are so full of their own inflated self-worth and hubris that they take it as a personal afront that anyone disagrees with them.

I don’t think there ever was an atmosphere of intellectual freedom at any educational institution, at any time, anywhere in the world — Pythagoras’ style of management appears to still be the going blueprint

Almost every important milestone advance humanity has achieved was won by individuals by their own independent efforts, often against the consensus, and on private time and money.

The University as we know it currently is a model that is existing on borrowed time(and money) — it will be interesting to see what happens when the teaching part is moved to mass online courses and so be split from research activities since a very different skill set will be needed in both spheres once they begin to specialize and streamline this way.

I agree completely, RWHC. As I’ve seen it here and other places, the traditional universities, including their faculty and administrators, are like dinosaurs fighting over a kill without seeing the meteor hurtling toward them. The intellectual and financial models of the early 21st century university are not sustainable.

This sort of thing was happening even during my time at the University in the 1980s. I just shook my head and selected a major in one of the “hard” sciences, where we were more concerned with nanograms per microliter, or elimination rate constants, than with (purportedly) indigenous place-names. I eventually graduated with a degree in clinical pharmacology.

My advice to any disillusioned student who may be reading this: come over to the Dark Side. Pick a major in (for example) physics, chemistry, mathematics, or engineering. Here on the Dark Side, we have cookies, and better employment opportunities once you graduate.

I don’t consider most “climate scientists” to be scientists. Science uses observation, experimentation, and hypothesis testing. There are some true climate scientists, but they are the ones who study paleoclimate without trying to over-read their data. As yet, we have no robust laboratory model with which to test climate change hypotheses, and data integrity is all but nonexistent.

I said that numbers were difficult to radicalize. I didn’t say that science was immune to bad data, conjecture, and humbug. The early 20th century had Piltdown Man; the early 21st has anthropogenic climate change.

My impression is that the climate scientists are mostly statisticians and computer geeks. Number crunchers. Any connection between them and the climate that exists outside their simulations is tenuous at best.

Actually, it seems that few if any of the AGW crowd are statisticians; their results would be more believable if they were all statisticians. A bare handful are computer geeks, that is to say, programmers, and their “climate model” programs are really copies of the one program written by … oh, damn; forgot his name; one of the earliest of the AGW bunch in any event, and the subsequent versions of the program are only different in their tables of constants, wherein the water cycle is expressed by single-digit constant integers all of which are used to increase the programs projected temperature increases.

The herd mentality of the education system (at all levels, not just the universities) holds sway only as long as there is a physical “herd” to control (or belong to). With internet access and the availability of educational curricula at their fingertips, more and more parents and students are opting to bypass traditional brick-and-mortal “teaching” facilities in favor of home schooling and online self-study. And who can blame them? Most educational institutions have become glorified day-care providers, indoctrination camps, or (in the case of colleges and universities) socialization centers offering an extended holiday from real-world participation and the responsibility for making one’s own way in life.

As costs explode and the quality of the product declines, education-consumers are reacting as free-marketers always do — by looking for better value elsewhere. Academics can wring their hands and debate the causes ad nauseum. What difference does it make? The market is speaking. Consumers are not buying their overpriced, ideologically infested product with it’s shoddy workmanship and substandard reliability.

The 4+ year sabbatical that passed for an advanced education is fading away, an artifact of the pre-internet age. The fences are down and the herd is fanning out, less beholden to the bullying of the old order. Can’t happen fast enough.

Colleges and Universities today are where newspapers and news magazines were a dozen years ago. While the technology will force changes anyway the unacknowledged left wing biases in academia have badly undercut the value of the brand. Just as readers came to realize there was more left wing opinion than news on the pages and dropped subscriptions, those doing the hiring have come to realize that having a degree no longer means they can expect the holder to be in command of a useful body of knowledge. Indeed, if the holder is a member of one of the academy’s favored victim groups the odds are the job applicant will have more attitude than ability.

Law schools already feel the bite as many schools are still accepting students for programs that will begin in a couple of weeks. In undergraduate institutions students increasingly opt for local school over more prestigious institutions that will require they also pay travel cost and room and board in addition to tuition. When on-line courses begin to offer credits towards a degree the rush towards them will be dramatic.

Can this damage be reversed? It is unlikely since as with the news media there is a complete failure to acknowledge that bias is a problem.

This is an excellent article. It reinforces what I have observed over the years as something of an outsider. I teach high school physics, and I have been required over the years to take many graduate level courses to maintain my certification. I can only say that things have gotten worse and worse among university faculty as the years have passed. Education departments in particular are full of sheep with letters after their names. I’ve always taken with particular delight how easily I, with only a BS in engineering physics, have been able to intimidate education faculty. I always enjoyed being able to pick apart their “experimental” results, especially when they use statistics that would garner ridicule in any biology department. This article highlights the reason why, in the real world, a degree in anything other than the hard sciences, engineering, business, or law is generally quite useless.

Education departments in particular are full of sheep with letters after their names.
Is that why diplomas are called sheepskins?
There are very few dissenting opinions in Ed School faculties. Nearly all follow the unproven theory of the year, which will discarded in a year or two for the next new unproven theory.

I’ve always taken with particular delight how easily I, with only a BS in engineering physics, have been able to intimidate education faculty.
It is easy because Ed School professors repeatedly present belief or conjecture as fact. All you need to refute them is the ability to reason and to research- find fact.

From my experience with Ed School professors, I came to the conclusion that the biggest group of fools on campus is to be found in Ed Schools.

This is nothing new. My aunt, who began teaching in the 1930s, had the same opinion of Ed School professors.

There are some competent Ed School professors. Unfortunately, they are few and far between.

Much, most maybe, of the craziness of EdSchools is driven by the column and step pay schemes most teacher have that gives them more pay for more education and by the need for continuing education to keep your certificate. Every year they have to think up more and more crazy stuff for somebody to to write a thesis or a dissertation about so they can take their diploma back to the HR office at the school district and get a nice raise. The whole system of satellite campuses is supported by these worthless pedagogy classes that teachers take to keep their certs and to get raises. Frankly, I don’t know that any continuing education is necessary for a K-12 teacher; 2-2=4 and subject verb object are the same when they graduate at 21 and when they retire at 41 – some states do still have 20 yr retirement for teachers, sweet ride.

Graduate programs in the Ed School are a joke. There are 8th grade classes which have a higher degree of intellectual difficulty. The implicit prof-student contract is “We will pretend to teach, and you will pretend to learn, in return for a passing grade.”

Doctoral dissertations are jokes, for the most part. I have read the Ed School doctoral dissertations written by some teachers or administrators I have known. My reaction, which I kept to myself, was “You got a doctoral degree for THAT?”

The dissertations I read were basically stories about a school, or schools. As if the doctoral student had interviewed some people and transferred the interviews to text. There is your ed school dissertation. Statistical rigor? Well, we gotta get something down on paper.

I went through Grades 1 – 12 in the old Southern “academy” model segregated school, though we did have two pioneers of integration who led a very unhappy life in my senior year. A “College Preparatory” diploma required two years of Latin AND a foreign language, math was Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra II, Calculus and Trigonometry, four years of English and both US and English Literature, in depth US and World History, as well as Georgia history and a senior US Government class that spend half the year going through the US Constitution line by line and the other half studying the USSR and communism. And, they actually graded, made you write papers, and often put lots of red ink on those papers. The only time I ever actually saw my college Freshman English professor he strode to the lectern in tweedy and bespectacled magnificence and told us that freshmen in college had nothing to say that educated people would be interested in so we were to be graded on how we said things, not what we said. We were to write in fountain pen on unlined paper or type our work. A sentence fragment or comma fault was an F and a mispelled word was a letter grade. You could correct by striking through but you didn’t dare.

Yet in that world where some academic rigor remained, by ’67 when I entered a then small state college the times they were ‘a changing. In history, literature, and the so-called social sciences most of my professors were decidely liberal and many were outright socialists with a few open communists. If you were a guy trying to keep a 2-S deferment, the only place you could really fail classes was in the hard sciences and math classes or if you just got stoned and never went to class at all – and even then you could go whine to the professor and get an incomplete and try to make it up or if you were already on academic probation, they’d give you the draft dodger’s C. A lot of guys got degrees that they would NEVER have gotten had it not been for lefist profs and the draft. A lot of those guys stayed in college all the way through to the PhD that they didn’t deserve in order to keep that 2-S deferment. They’re tenured professors, department heads, and deans now.

I hated college and when the lottery started and I got a high number, I dropped out, got a job, got married, had a kid and got on with life, leaving the “life of the mind” far behind. I got to watch the steady deterioration of K-12 education as a parent and by the time my kid was in college in the early ’90s, it was evident that all she had to do was pay and show up. By the time my stepkids were in K-12 in the ’90s and ’00s, the public schools were simply the enemy of responsible parents. My oldest stepson got a “Communications” degree with a decent GPA from a Lower 48 state school and I’m confident that he has never read all of any book – and it wasn’t for our lack of trying to get him to.

I went back to college in the late ’90s when I was in exile from the goverment; it’s the modern equivalent of going to the monastery. I stayed on the chancellor’s list with absolutely minimal effort. I took lots of writing and literature classes but couldn’t really get either the editing or criticism I needed from the professors. My punctuation, grammar, and syntax had gotten sloppy from years of nobody checking it; the grammar nazis in the typing pool went away with the personal computer, but my professors weren’t any better than I was and didn’t seem to care. Most of the younger students couldn’t have written an organized paragraph if their life depended on it and none of them could speak in formal, standard English, not that they were often asked to. The ideological orthodoxy was unquestioned and really all you could do wrong was not be politically correct, which meant I had some pretty good battles with a couple of lefty profs that were brave enough to try to take me on; most weren’t.

I found lefty professors to be like union advocates or lefty lawyers; they’ve learned all the lefty spells and incantations and can recite them with what sounds like erudition, but they cannot get off the script. They also don’t know how to handle your getting off the script they expect you to be on. We on the right see this in the major culture with all the lefty projection of what their orthodoxy tells them we are and what they expect us to be, say, and do. Of course that ABC reporter concluded the theater shooter was a Tea Party member; that is all that leftist orthodoxy would allow him to think.

This knowlege gives us the best tool to deal with them socially and politically. The school of hard knocks will convert some lefties but generally if they’ve found a way to be a lefty and still make a living, they’ll stay a lefty for life, so there is no reason to try to persuade them to any other point of view; any conversions would be forced and fake. They simply must be defeated and the way to defeat them is to not do what they expect you to do. They think we’re stupid and they’re very proud of how smart they are, so they lay out what they’re going to do and what they expect you to do. The OWSers were talking about how they needed a “Kent State Moment” because they fully expected the right to give them one.

Everything about Trotsky/Alinsky organizing is about provoking otherwise sane, rational people into doing something stupid or violent, preferably both. I maintain that conservatives really can’t use Alinsky but they have to recognize it and plan against it. The intellectual orthodoxy the writer is condemning is both the left’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. If you cannot or will not recite the proper lefty incantations, you are immediately recognizable to them as an evil “other,” so they easily ostracize the heretics and apostates, which keeps them united, avoids messy primaries, and maintains caucus discipline for them. We on the other hand are messy. That allows us to think rationally and creatively but it also makes it far more difficult to unite us, but unite we must or face our whole society becoming the stultifying society of the faculty lounge.

Well, this is the situation you get when you gather together a group of individuals where they spend their days doing little of objective consequence. Having no objective standards to rank individuals, beauty and conformity become the driving elements. High school mean girls and Humanities faculty, not a lot of difference except the mean girls are usually prettier.

Of course, the universities being ideological blind could be transformational. Coupled with anti-male bias and online learning, it could be the late 17th century all over again.

“Newcomen’s religion had consequences greater than absence from a local census. Dissenters, including Baptists, Presbyterians, and others, were as a class, excluded from universities after 1660, an either apprenticed, or learned their science from dissenting academies.”

“At the same time that he chartered the world’s first scientific society, Charles II had created an entire generation of dissenting intellectuals uncontrolled by his kingdom’s ever more technophobic universities.”

p29, Rosen, Willam, ‘The Most Powerful Idea in the World’

Of course, all we got out of that was the steam engine and mechanical power. Interesting, how it is the university that is now so anti-industrial revolution. Maybe they harbor a grudge for the world moving ahead despite them?

Out of the mouth of babes, as a recent article in the WSJ on unprepared college students relates, sometimes come harsh truths for the professoriate.

“One struggling freshman summed it up for all of us when he wrote, ‘Life has too much realism.’ ”

It’s not the leftism, it’s the “oikophobia.” My wife teaches at a Very Large State Institution that you’ve all heard of, and at a dinner with some faculty I said “You should all get on your knees and thank God every morning that there are taxpayers willing to let you study French Resistance avant-garde poetry from the 1940s.”

They looked at me like I was from another planet. I happen to think their research into French poetry is kind of interesting. But their ingratitude of the culture that allows them them to study such arcana was frustrating to me.

My college career was rather long and convoluted and I took 13 years to receive my bachelors. In that time I learned to be disgusted with the prevailing liberal orthodoxy and the expectation that I would abide by it. The expectation of chuckles from the students when the professor mocked Ronald Reagan is one example of the peer pressure indoctrination, as everyone and the profeesor looked around to see who was “hip”.

I have several liberal friends (who all seem to have went to Catholic school as youngsters). They love to tell me how it was the “do as we tell you”, in-your-face manner of Christianity that “drove” them away from the church. I always say, I know exactly what you mean. It was the “do as we tell you”, in-your-face manner of my liberal professors that drove away from liberalism.

It’s funny that they never agree that shoving a liberal viewpoint down someone’s throat may alienate that person, but they’ll tell you over and over again that religion being shoved down people’s throats turns them away.

The same analysis can be applied to the we adherents of the Catholic faith with regards to “social teaching”. In an effort to understand the truth, I attended what will be a 3 night presentation on this subject, beginning last night and the answer to “What is a human right?” was presented as the definition from the UN?!? The foundational principles (we only covered 1 last night) started with the vilification of the individual and the lauding of the common good to which EVERYONE (we were told!) has a responsibility. It seems coercion is allowed for this obligation. I asked about the single person who lawfully earns his way, but chooses to not engage in any community. Isn’t that an individual’s right? Isn’t God alone his judge? Apparently not….community thy name is subjugation.

Who is surprised by the fear of expressing an opinion different from the prevailing “wisdom?” I am 68 years young. I grew up in the fifties and sixties. I attended parties where young people tried to impress one another with their knowledge and sophistication. We coined a phrase, “psuedo-intellectuals.” Few of them would dare disagree with the elite. When a logical questions was asked, the pseudos would laugh at the ignorance of questioning what everyone knew was the truth. It has been going on since men began meeting to discuss the issues. If we were all individual thinkers, it would be impossible to rouse up mobs to loot and burn. Also, it would be harder to get people to vote for a candidate without proper vetting.

I was in my teens when stereophonic high fidelity became the fury of the day. We were told that we should position ourselves in the line bisecting the two speakers, and we could distinctly recognize sounds emanating from each side of the orchestra. This was probably not quite true, but the listening experience was better, and the industry was booming. Today we have surround sound, and we are supposed to be immersed in the auditive space.

Universities should exhibit such a characteristic, not in the auditive space, but the intellectual domain. Students should be exposed to a variety of intellectual perspectives, and find out for themselves where the true “diversity” really is, in the competing intellectual paradigms along the path of history, not in the ethnical profile of the student body or faculty. Of course, that does not apply to mathematics and science, since these disciplines aim to identify notions that are demonstrably objective. This is why the intellectual integrity of these departments is still standing, in spite of being burdened with a disproportionate fraction of the institutional overhad costs.

Once a university becomes hostage to one particular dogma, it might as well be dead, a process which, by the way, has already started.

But there is a way out of this trap: Really good teachers, (yes, the do exist), need not be afraid of investing their careers in the online education market, where true competition can still take place, and where none of the tuition money needs be sunk into the administrative bulges of institutions marooned in the trappings of orthodoxy and inertia.

A la carte learning, at competitive prices! Who should be afraid of that?

Who should be afraid? Anybody who wants a wage job! There’s a reason for all the push on accreditation and the drive against “for profit” universities. The primary consumer of all the “Communications” and “Studies” graduates is government. The minimum qualification for many, many, Hell, most, jobs is “a degree.” It doesn’t have to be a degree in whatever you’re being hired to do, just a college degree and it will get you a ten year head start on somebody without a degree no matter what their specific skills.

“A degree” will get you a job in the middle of the technical ranks or the bottom of the supervisory ranks in almost any government professional/technical/clerical job classification. It is all too common that the 22 year old kid right out of college with no job experience – kids don’t work these days – is further up the org chart, makes much more money, and quite often has supervisory authority over the person who has ten years or more of actual performance in the duties of the job.

In natural resources, fish and game, and environmental departments of governments, they don’t hire the qualified biologist, engineer, or geologist – can’t afford them, don’t really want those prickly people around – they hire the “Natural Resources Studies” or “Environmental Management” major and make her a supervisor; she doesn’t know jack about manageing natural resources but she is a thoroughly indoctrinated environazi.

Business, especially large corporations with deep enough pockets to make discrimination suits worth enough to buy that new Lexus and pay the mistress’s condo dues don’t want the cost and hassle involved in developing tested, “certified,” non-discriminatory hiring and promotion tests and standards, so they slap a degree requirement on the girl who makes the copies and brings the coffee.

If I’m the Governor or CEO and the federal government has a laser dot on my forehead, a stroke of the pen enables me to stick the words “accredited by the Obama approved accrediting agency” before the “any degree” requirement and those troublesome veterans who got their degrees in the unfashionable schools that cater to the military, DeVry and other technical skills specialist schools, and, especially, University of Phoenix no long qualify for any degree requiring job.

The other side of this is that we Republicans control over half of the state governments and that same stroke of the pen would enable us to allow work substitution, somehting government actually does a good bit of, and not give the “Studies” graduate a ten year head start over the person who can actually do the job. If I were looking to hire an attorney in a Republican government, I’d want to have known his/her family for three or four generations before I’d hire an Ivy League grad.

At the base of this in the states we control, we really should pay as much attention to who gets elected and appointed to local school board (hint, the NEA owns practically every local board in the Country), who gets elected or appointed as commissioner/secretary of education, to state boards of education, and, especially, to state boards of regents. But nothing state house races are more fun and give a better likelihood of getting your hooves in the government trough.

JF: “No matter the reigning orthodoxy — in our department it was, as in the vast majority of English departments across North America, Leftist, anti-Western, feminist, and multiculturalist — the desire to fall in line, and to compel or outlaw those who do not… I still remember my surprise at the uniformity of opinion I discovered…”

“Socialism seeks to reduce human personality to its most primitive levels and to extinguish the highest, most complex, and “God-like” aspects of human individuality. And even equality itself, that powerful appeal and great promise of socialists throughout the ages, turns out to signify not equality of rights, of opportunities, and of external conditions, but equality qua identity, equality seen as the movement of variety toward uniformity.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.This is known as “bad luck.” — Robert A. Heinlein

One of the kids’ GMU professors noted that back when Christ said that it’s easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into Heaven (and just about every other time in history), a man could only get rich through the exploitation of other human beings. But in a capitalist society, men become rich by improving the lives of others around them.

It is sad to see that you commenters are all old fools like me. Maybe the lady that suggested on line learning has the answer as Unis lose students and money in the coming collapse. Lastly, and sadly the people who are college profs were ostracized for social/personal reasons in high school. They are terrified of being thrown out again. Hence conformity in the only place possible to stay in a pack.

bobby says “the people who are college profs were ostracized for social/personal reasons in high school.”

There’s something to that. In my more than 40 years on college campuses, I noticed a pronounced but formless hostility to athletes and cheerleaders, especially among those holding non-quant degrees. Eventually, I decided that the real issue was perceived personal status vs desired personal status, with those most hostile to traditional America fancying themselves to have been given the short ends of the admiration, prestige and compensation sticks. Soon they discover that their PhD won’t get them the big money and the hot chicks/dudes, either. Another puzzlement: masters-degree students in psychology/sociology seemed to have more than their share of personal/social problems. No formal research involved, here. Just long, informal observation. I never had much interaction with the identity types in the ethnic/women’s/etc studies departments. I suspect they subconsciously hate themselves, project that hate onto the general American society, and demand reparations for being who they are.

One can judge from experiment, or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all important and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority.– Robert A. Heinlein

So the question is, with such conformity among the professoriate and the documented failure of the professoriate to impart useful intellectual skills to students; skills such as competent composition, critical thinking and intellectual curiosity; perhaps it is time to withdraw the taxpayers’s funds from these failed institutions. If a business permit can be denied due to the private speech of a business CEO, should funding not be denied due to the well documented failure of a professoriate whose views are not reflective and often hostile to the taxpayer? Funding forcibly taken from the taxpayer through threat of prosecution and violence.

Well, duh! Peer group pressure, with the peer groups including educators (which propagandize kids), the media, educators (who propagandize its few non-governmental workers and all government workers), so-called African Americans, kids (who don’t know better , many entrepreneurs (who don’t understand much about how they got rich), trial lawyers (obvious), sports figures and Hollywood actors (who have no clue in general), and various affinity groups like (gays) all just want to be liked. They don’t understand for what they stand only that the other guys like me because I agree with them. Republicans, too, don’t have a clue that they simply are unpopular.

The true conservatives of today are the mislabeled “liberals”, “Progressives” and members of the Democratic Party — all one in unanimity. For what do they stand: No Change. They are in power, they win elections, they dictate: what we can say, what we can buy, what we can make, what we can smoke, what we can eat, what we can read or see in the media, who we can hire, who we can(‘t) fire, what we can drive and so on. For example the so-called educators of this great land don’t want any change and, I hate to write this and it isn’t 100% true, they don’t care so much whether their charges learn. In fact for the most part the Left doesn’t want an educated population. If they actually could think for them selves, voters would seek freedom over the dictates of the Left.

Nearly 100% of union dues targeted for political giving goes to the Democratic Party. Which side here wants change? Which side is the conservative side? Today’s true liberals want change. They want union monopolies broken, as monopolies for companies were broken a hundred years ago. The Democratic Party politicians don’t want that to change…they get the money and the votes. Change? You gotta be kidding. They are the conservatives.

I am in my last year as a professor (humanities) at a name brand liberal arts college and regard elite education as one of the most monstrous impostures in the United States including government. As for multiculturalism, it is a fraud from top to bottom. It is designed to unite all non white, non western people into a power block outnumbering caucasian westerners as oppressors to be tamed and deracinated by their victims. In theory the movement is merely corrective, placing western culture on equal ground with all other cultures but actually subjugated with all other cultures to liberal ideology which trumps any other claim to cultural authority. There are shameful concessions to Islam afoot but I can only see that last until the West is finally broken. The irony, of course, is that the liberal left is a product of Western culture but the object of this game is power, not truth.

Will the campaign triumph totally? Despite its success to date I doubt it, because Western principles have a strong appeal and in certain respects, as in science,are essential to the maintenance of the race. That doesn’t mean that the outcome won’t be ugly and chaotic. My own view is that times of trouble are coming that most of us simply cannot imagine.

I have been a dissident, but in general a non-combatant. The war was decided when I began my career. I have lost all respect for the American Academy which houses far more liars and fools than any institution has a right to. I will say that in general science and mathematics remain relatively sound, but as for the rest, the termites mass more than the timber.

“I maintain that conservatives really can’t use Alinsky but they have to recognize it and plan against it. The intellectual orthodoxy the writer is condemning is both the left’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness.”

An Air Force Colonel developed a theory describing how successful fighter pilots win (survive!). It is called the OODA loop. The pilot first Orients himself, Observes the situation, Decides, then Attacks (Acts). Repeat. The flyer who can repeatedly work this loop fastest and make mostly correct decisions, wins. When two equally trained pilots face off, the one that is fastest and can break the loop of his opponent wins. Furstest with the mostest.

The OODA loop applies to many other areas. Alinsky rule book is an OODA loop. We break it, we win.

The Trade School on North Avenue held out for awhile, but in those days it was almost exclusively a STEM school. ‘Course, UGA’s football teams were almost all white too for awhile so Tech had a chance of winning now and again. Wasn’t long before the UGA – GIT game was just like any other SEC game: the fat white frat boys and their dates/wives from one school sit across the beautiful field on a beautiful fall day from the fat white frat boys and their dates/wives from another school to enjoy a contest to determine which school can afford the biggest baddest black guys.

When I was at Georgia Southern College, formerly the Georgia Normal School, in the late ’60s, it had less than 4000 students, maybe a third of whom should actually have been in college – I wasn’t among those who should have been in college either; smart enough, really good test scores, but exactly zero discipline. There was a time when the school would have either straightened me out or thrown me out; they just put up with me. Last I looked, now Georgia Southern University has over 14,000 students and I’m willing to be no more of them should be in college than when I was there and only AA and grade inflation allow any significant percentage to graduate. Gotta do something to suck in those Pell Grants and all that Georgia Lottery money.

Call it what it really is. The American Inquisition. Every campus is filled with local Torquemadas, ready to root out theological error and punish with expulsion those who resist. Those who practice differently do it in secret and are called marranos (Spanish for pigs), just like the hidden Jews of Spain

My friend believes that anyone without a solid grasp of quantum electrodynamics and its complexities is not worth spit. Though he expresses himself in a more genteel fashion, he means every word. He knows that I am ignorant of this topic, but he is tolerant of me as he is of all men until they express themselves about things in words that are little different from grunts and burps.

That being said, it is necessary to understand the process that leads to the acquisition of a doctoral degree. After proper screening by course work and competency examinations in the particular field, what is left is the demeaning and degrading process of writing a dissertation that must meet the criteria propounded by the doctoral candidate’s committee. Indeed, the doctoral candidate must assemble his own committee by interesting individual professors in his ideas. Well, professors are not interested in the candidate’s ideas but in their own. Therefore, each successful candidate hangs out in the offices of his potential committee members and cultivates them. He reads their writings for hints of what he must think is important. He brings them coffee, tells them jokes, looks deep into their eyes and in the worst cases, treats them to dinner and introduces them to his family and friends. I recall a friend who was dismissed from a doctoral program because he refused to compose a chapter in the professor’s upcoming textbook. As in most non-science fields, it cannot hurt to be pretty (or handsome), if you get my drift. Doctoral candidates are often abused, but must push on to acquire their “final” degree. It is little wonder that those who make it have the ability to grovel or turn from the abused to the abuser.

Janice, Your opening paragraph took me back to the University of Guelph, Department of English, College of Arts, circa 1971, when that august institution in its wisdom denied tenure stream appointments–the only ones denied that year–by a weird coincidence to three Jewish academics, one a Marxist & one a refugee from Hitler’s Germany. The resulting brouhaha, coming as it did in the middle of the Vietnam era at a university rife with US draft dodgers, made for interesting times. But convention triumphs: the memory of those three profs is lost except to the son of one of them. A building stands on campus named after the chief anti-semite and parochial southern Ontario academic of that time.

Comment #40, Sayre’s Law: “Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.” is completely accurate.

Your observations about the mechanisms of ideological conformity are right on the money. The fact that tenured professors have near-zero accountability, limited responsibilities about time and budgetary constraints, and no source of challenge or conflict within their classrooms are all factors which contribute to self-induced slavery and compulsion. Ask any crackhead or porn addict: nothing enslaves you more totally than a lack of boundaries.

We are all at the brain stem pack animals, with a lot of cocker-spaniel-need for acceptance. Intelligence and education do not make one immune from either irrational impulse or plain error. In fact, I observe that really championship levels of stupidity always involve a great deal of intellectual gymnastics and verbal dexterity to avoid focusing on the obvious realities staring you in the face. Surrounding oneself with an echo chamber of equally erudite chatterers makes it a lot easier.
Without a strong moral compass, the path of least resistance takes us in one direction. For university professors who have nothing in their day-to-day routine to keep them grounded in reality, the route to radicalism is the easiest and least risky.

Concur wholeheartedly with the point of the article–in other words, cowardice is most established in those who disdain the very idea of establishment. As a university prof myself, the independence of thinking so vaunted in today’s academy is an endangered species of the present–hardly to be found.

‘Narcissism’ (i.e: self-image) is only caused (of course) by fear: fear that if the might-makes-right group dislikes you, you will suffer, but if you can become what it likes (even through lying about yourself) then it will not only protect you, but allow you, as it’s leader, to destroy your own enemies as well. Narcissism always and only becomes malignant by acquiring power (‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’), otherwise, it Submits to it’s own fear of powerlessness.

The main problem is that liberals hate personal responsibility, so they avoid it by selling endless group-rights victimology scenarios instead. That way the cowards can pretend to be champions without risking the dangers of having to accuse any actual real individual human criminals of their crimes!

Leftists of all colours don’t think at all – they only react to fearing fear by wanting to form ever-larger groups to protect themselves from self-responsibility!

They lie to themselves, then to others, by pretending their new imaginings are old memories!
They thus always reverse cause and effect, to justify their image over reality preferences!

In fact, ALL infantile delinquent liberals pretend to imagine that:

“Since there’s always a diverse multiplicity of causes and effects for everything, not only are we all helpless victims before life’s complexities, but it’s also true that all facts are really only opinions anyway! So my subjective, fact-free opinion is the diversely opposite ‘equal to your silly objective facts! Whee! So, obviously we all need a bigger group to protect us from ourselves and from other dangerous groups! Only groups should have rights, and all merely fallible and so potentially dangerous individual human citizens should at most be assigned some temporary, revokable privileges!

And furthermore, it’s only my right to be irresponsible, and only everyone else’s responsibility to be right (as in factually correct)!

It’s my right to remain wrong, and to get you to pay for it! It’s my privileged liberal victimology entitlement dividend, and don’t you forget it, you hater racist bigots!”

Any further questions, suckers?

And, (never having any facts which would ever agree with their perpetual, perverse irrationality,) the left must always resort to the slanderous evasions known collectively as the critical thinking logical fallacies (ad-hominems, red-herrings, and especially the immoral relativist’s favorite, the tu quoque – i.e: “islam isn’t evil because we all do it too! Whee!”).

Isn’t it funny that people who actually have facts, rarely (if ever) seem to feel the need to indulge in fallacies?

But hey, it’s deliberate cirminal negligence: their REAL MOTTO is simply: “THERE’S NO MONEY IN SOLUTIONS!”

They only con everyone else into givng money to their group of self-promoting “crisis-relief management expert” SALESMEN! To those who always ignore the real, simple, permanent solutions to these temporary problems, in favor of exploiting the infinite symptoms of ignoring them into perpetually lucrative, “eternal crises” i.e: Please Give Generously – AGAIN!”

This is one of the main reasons I applied (and thank god, got in) to a service academy. Our faculty, both active-duty military and professional academics, were required to keep the politics out of the classroom. Most didn’t have tenure, and most weren’t there to publish papers; they were there to impart as much knowledge within their semester block as possible. Our instructors had actual work hours (0730-1630) and if they weren’t in class or at the gym, they were requireed to be in their office, available to tutor. Most of the active-duty officers, too, had a vested interest in making sure us cadets learned – not only did crappy student performance reflect negatively on their own performance reports, but they didn’t want an incompetent crop of new 2Lts coming into “their” Air Force come May.

The curriculum was tech-heavy, but even the relatively small amount of Humanities courses we took was eye-opening for some of my peers who had never been taught the positive effects and developments of Western Europe. One of my best teachers was a Muslim who was extremely frank with us about both the good and the bad of his religion. We had some extremely good debates in class that the instructors neither moderated nor “corrected” to suit their own views. It wasn’t about stuffing us full of Air Force propaganda, but getting us to think about the issues and formulate our own decisions (a skill that’s essential in military officers).

They drowned us in homework, they had strict limits on how many cadets could receive “A”s in specific courses, and if your GPA dropped below 2.0, you were restricted to base until you got it back up. If you didn’t get it back up, you got kicked out.

It certainly wasn’t perfect. But it was a place that banned politics, encouraged respectful discussion, employed as instructors people who had a direct interest in ensuring their students legitimately succeeded, and placed high, enforceable demands on both teachers and students. I really think the key to it was that the faculty had a mission – get the cadets ready for the real world, rather than service their own egos/positions via adherence to collective orthodoxy. I’d have to believe there’s a way of bringing that sort of concept to civilian institutions.